Free The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer Page A

those rumors, and in fact I was not altogether free of the accusation, as I have tried to show. Even the ten lines which so displeased Rinehart had been altered a bit; I had shown them once to a friend whose opinion I respected, and he remarked that while it was impossible to accept the sort of order Rinehart had laid down, still a phrase like the “fount of power” had a Victorian heaviness about it. Well, that was true, it was out of character for O’Shaugnessy’s new style, and so I altered it to the “thumb of power” and then other changes became desirable, and the curious are invited to compare the two versions of this particular passage, * but the mistake I made was to take a small aesthetic gain on those lines and lose a larger clarity about a principle.
    What more is there to say? The book moved fairly well. It climbed to seven and then to six on the
New York Times
best-seller list, stayed there for a week or two, and then slipped down. By Christmas, the tone of the
Park
and the Christmas spirit being not all that congenial, it was just about off the lists forever. It didwell, however; it would have reached as high as three or two or even to number one if it had come out in June and then been measured against the low sales of summer, for it sold over fifty thousand copies after returns, which surprised a good many in publishing, as well as disappointing a few, including myself. I discovered that I had been poised for an enormous sale or a failure—a middling success was cruel to take. Week after week I kept waiting for the book to erupt into some dramatic change of pace which would send it up in sales instead of down, but that never happened. I was left with a draw, not busted, not made, and since I was empty at the time, worn-out with work, waiting for the quick transfusions of a generous success, the steady sales of the book left me deeply depressed. Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness. Like a starved revolutionary in a garret, I had compounded out of need and fever and vision and fear nothing less than a madman’s confidence in the identity of my being and the wants of all others, and it was a new dull load to lift and to bear, this knowledge that I had no magic so great as to hasten the time of the apocalypse but that instead I would be open like all others to the attritions of half-success and small failure. Something God-like in my confidence began to leave, and I was reduced in dimension if now less a boy. I knew I had failed to bid on the biggest hand I ever held.
    The proper end to this account is the advertisement I took in
The Village Voice.
It was bought in November 1955, a month after publication, it was put together by me and paid for by me, and it was my way I now suppose of saying good-bye to the pleasure of a quick triumph, of making my apologies for the bad flaws in the bravest effort I had yet pulled out of myself, and certainly for declaring to the world (in a small way, mean pity) that I no longer gave a sick dog’s drop for the wisdom, the reliability, and the authority of the public’s literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
    Besides, I had the tender notion—believe it if you will—that the ad might after all do its work and excite some people to buy the book.

BEST-SELLERS

    N ow that this once-outsized lust in me for large sales has settled into more reasonable expectations, I may as well offer some later thoughts on the subject.
    Writing a best-seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous than anticipated. When a putative and modest writer of best-sellers finally becomes professional enough to write a winner, he or she thinks that a great feat has been brought off, even as a